rhaenyra was a feudal lord of dragonstone for two decades, and ruling directly in her seat for six years immediately previous to the events of this season; she is not actually new to governance even if ruling the seven kingdoms is a vast uptick in scale. the show doesn’t seem to remember or realize this and of course she is incredibly shocked by everything about ruling in this episode, because the show can’t sort of get outside of the presentist gawp of “wow, isn’t it crazy you didn’t used to have an INTERVIEW for this thing 😂?” which is the least interesting angle possible. like considering the chuckleheads running our democracies. like, yes. and there are many people very unqualified for jobs won by a supposed system of merit as well. nonetheless, this is how many political systems in many places ran for millennia. even if hereditary throw of the dice made the character of who actually wielded power largely a toss up, these systems did actually have mechanisms in place for training people to hold power and rhaenyra partook in them. reviewers called the episode successionesque, which filled me with foreboding. first of all if i wanted to watch succession i would watch succession. i want to watch hotd. second of all the rhaenyra-shiv roy “faildaughter” comparisons have irritated for years, and here they come. rhaenyra is a princess of a feudal monarchy who rides a dragon and seeks to ascend a throne with a dual spiritual-temporal dimension, not a candidate for a modern CEO, and i do think the differences are critical, and i am not so incurious as to reroute every single human experience across time and history to my own most immediately graspable context. royal scions are not “nepobabies.” there are other worlds than this!
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